LET Secondary English Major: 150-Item Specialization Review Plan

LET Secondary English Major: 150-Item Specialization Review Plan

If you're a BSEd English major, your specialization test is 150 items covering linguistics, the structure of English, literature, and how to teach and assess language and literature. It's the last test of LET day (3:00–6:30 p.m., 3.5 hours) and carries 40% of your rating.

This is the English plan that the LET Specialization overview hands off to. It's self-study: build it around the official table of specifications (TOS).

What PRC's TOS covers

The English TOS in Board of Professional Teachers Resolution No. 11, s. 2025 splits the 150 items like this:

Source: BPT Resolution No. 11, s. 2025 (English TOS). Download it from prc.gov.ph and check it against your own copy before you plan.

Three groups carry most of the test: linguistics and structure of English (32 items), the four literature topics (45 items), and teaching and assessment of the macroskills and of literature (30 items). The fourteen small topics at 3–4 items each still add up to 43 items, so don't skip them: a quick pass on each is worth it.

Structure of English

This block tests usage at an advanced academic level, beyond what Gen Ed's Purposive Communication covers. Drill list:

• Subject-verb agreement, including collective nouns, indefinite pronouns and inverted sentences
• Pronoun reference and pronoun-antecedent agreement, including ambiguous reference
• Tense and aspect: simple, perfect, progressive, perfect progressive
• Modal verbs: ability, permission, possibility, obligation, advice
• Conditional sentences: zero, first, second, third, mixed
• Passive voice across tenses
• Reported speech with tense changes
• Gerunds vs infinitives
• Articles: definite, indefinite, zero article
• Subjunctive mood
• Parallel structure
• Misplaced and dangling modifiers
• Noun, adjective and adverb clauses

Items often give a long sentence and ask for the error or the best revision.

Linguistics

• Phonetics and phonology: place and manner of articulation, English vowels and consonants, IPA basics
• Morphology: free vs bound morphemes, derivational vs inflectional morphology
• Syntax: phrase structure, deep vs surface structure (Chomsky)
• Semantics: sense vs reference, polysemy, ambiguity
• Pragmatics: speech acts, deixis, implicature, presupposition
• Sociolinguistics: dialect, register, language variation, code-switching (this overlaps with Language, Culture and Society)

Literature

The TOS literature topics cover children and adolescent literature, mythology and folklore, a survey of Philippine literature in English, Afro-Asian literature and English and American literature, and contemporary, popular and emergent literatures. For each writer, know the period, major works and themes.

Philippine literature in English:

• Paz Marquez Benitez: "Dead Stars" (often called the first modern Filipino short story in English)
• Jose Garcia Villa (poetry)
• Manuel Arguilla: "How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife"
• Carlos Bulosan: America Is in the Heart, The Laughter of My Father
• Bienvenido Santos: "Scent of Apples"
• Nick Joaquin: "May Day Eve", The Woman Who Had Two Navels, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
• N.V.M. Gonzalez: "The Bread of Salt"
• Edith Tiempo: "Bonsai"
• F. Sionil Jose: the Rosales saga (Po-on, Tree, My Brother, My Executioner, The Pretenders, Mass)
• Contemporary writers: Merlinda Bobis, Lakambini Sitoy, Eric Gamalinda

Also know the landmark works that come up across Philippine literature generally: José Rizal's Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, and Francisco Balagtas's Florante at Laura.

Afro-Asian literature:

• Rabindranath Tagore (India), Haruki Murakami (Japan), Mo Yan (China), Han Kang (South Korea)
• Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), J.M. Coetzee (South Africa)
• Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk

English and American literature:

• Shakespeare (Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, the sonnets), Milton (Paradise Lost), Swift (Gulliver's Travels)
• Romantics and Victorians: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron; Dickens, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot
• American: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain
• Modernists: Joyce, Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner

Mythology and folklore:

• Greek and Roman myths (and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey)
• Philippine epics: Hudhud (Ifugao), Darangen (Maranao), Ibalong (Bikol), Biag ni Lam-ang (Ilocano), Hinilawod (Panay)
• Folktales, legends and fables from different countries

Children and adolescent literature: know the genres (picture books, folk and fairy tales, fables, young adult fiction), the criteria for choosing texts for a grade level, and how to use them to build literacy.

Literary criticism

A small block, but predictable:

• Formalism / New Criticism (close reading, the text on its own)
• Structuralism (binary oppositions, signs, codes)
• Reader-response theory
• Marxist criticism
• Feminist criticism
• Post-colonial criticism (Said, Spivak, Bhabha)
• Psychoanalytic criticism (Freud, Lacan)
• Deconstruction (Derrida)

Items often ask which approach would focus on a given feature of a text. Match each approach to its central concern.

Teaching and assessing language and literature

These two topics are 30 items together, so give them real time.

• The macroskills: listening, speaking, reading, writing and viewing
• Reading approaches: phonics, whole language, balanced literacy, content-area reading
• Reading strategies: SQ3R, KWL, think-aloud, reciprocal teaching
• Reading levels: independent, instructional, frustration
• The writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, publishing
• Listening: top-down vs bottom-up processing, listening for gist, detail and inference
• Speaking: fluency vs accuracy, pronunciation, communicative competence
• Assessing language and literature: rubrics, portfolios, peer and self-assessment
• Teaching literature: reader-response activities, literature circles, choosing texts for the level

Language programs and policies

A small block, but tied to current Philippine policy. Know the bilingual education policy, the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) policy under the K-12 law, and RA 12027 (2024), which discontinued the mother tongue as the medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Grade 3 (with exceptions for monolingual classes).

An 8-week English specialization plan

Aim for 80%+ in practice. At 40% weight, a strong specialization rating cushions a weaker Gen Ed.

Practice with Super Tutor

Super Tutor does not cover the English specialization. Its LET Secondary reviewer covers the other two tests: Gen Ed English, Filipino, Mathematics and Social Sciences, plus the Prof Ed subjects, in 11 study formats with practice quizzes at three difficulty levels and an AI tutor that explains any question step by step. Use it for Gen Ed and Prof Ed while you self-study your major with the TOS. Start free — 5-day trial, no card.

What to read next

The LET Specialization overview covers every major. The Prof Ed review and Gen Ed review cover the other two tests. The LET Secondary pillar guide ties it all together.